Paul B. wrote:When I love a wine, I let it be known - and them's my favourite words by which to do it!

Two thoughts, to be taken as free advice worth what you paid for it:

* When a glass of simple table wine earns such lavish praise as "most amazingly awesome thing in the history of the world," what have you got held in reserve to use when something REALLY awesome happens?

* You know those Internet sigs that some of us put as an automated tail on the end of forum posts? Some of them are funny as hell; others are witty or thought provoking. They're all interesting the first time you see them. But the 100th time you see them, you're either irritated or you just tune them out completely.

Excess of zeal in the service of tasting is sort of like an Internet sig in this regard.

I believe that keeping this forum open to a variety of interests and personal styles trumps all the rest. The intended model is not, I hope, a prestigious academic journal for only "worthy" topics and "astute" observations (come on, this is wine!). Some people are spare and precise in their use of language; others more flamboyant and expressive. Some make their own wine (better, at times, than much of what can be bought); others have no intererest in it. And like every other human activity, some are just plain better than others at tasting and putting tastes into words. In the end these are small matters. The company is what's important, and the various iterations of WLDG have always attracted good and knowledgeable company. I'd much rather put up with seeing some stuff I don't care for than risk missing the interesting but offbeat that had been proscribed.

Dan Smothergill wrote:I'd much rather put up with seeing some stuff I don't care for than risk missing the interesting but offbeat that had been proscribed.

Well said, and you can count on that, Dan. And I appreciate Paul being such a good sport about being used as the poster boy for the labrusca parade. Bottom line: All wine-related topics are related here, and we're not going to segregate them by variety, region or style.

Of course, you know that I agree with you, especially when it comes to different individuals' use of language (I'm notorious for hyperbole whenever I get excited over something, though I wonder if that comes across properly in posts), and also as regards homemade wines of quality.

I have to tell you that your wines and Howie's wines have been more impressive than MANY - and I really mean MANY - commercial wines that I've had over the years. When one makes an artisanal wine with true hands-on care, this fact can't help but be noticed in the end product. This is a fact with all grape varieties - hybrid, labrusca, aestivalis and vinifera.

And, deep down to many of us, wine really is a down-to-earth kind of thing to be shared with joy among good friends instead of a haughty indicator of class or upwardly-mobile pretension - this latter way of looking at it is utterly foreign to me, which is why even a humble table wine can get me very excited when it pushes all the right buttons on the gustatory and intellectual planes.